Satellite Captures Wall of Dust Moving Across Sahara

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Wow — this looks HUGE from orbit — can you imagine standing out in the Sahara Desert and seeing this gigantic wall of dust heading right towards you? The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite observed this wall of dust on April 22, 2010 which spans hundreds of kilometers. See the image below for a wider view of the area.

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

The region affected by this dust storm includes not just the Sahara Desert but also the Sahel, a semi-arid grassland region bordering the massive desert on the south. The dust plume hovers primarily over Burkina Faso and Mali. Straddling the border between Burkina Faso and Niger, an especially thick layer of dust appears to push southeastward.

Got something similar here in Cork, Ireland, we took two samples about 70k apart, we saw some sulfur and olivine as well as lots of quartz under the microscope. Extremely fine grained stuff, to the naked eye it was a fine light brown colour with visible sparking probably from the quartz. We concluded ash fall from Iceland.